Let me admit this up front. I love fonts. Lots of fonts. Most people who mess around with graphic design come down with the font disease sooner or later, and the sooner you get it, the more fonts you end up with. I got it sooner, mostly because my wife is a calligrapher, and magazines like Calligraphy Review act upon the font disease like gasoline on a brushfire. As a result, more than 25% of my 105 Meg hard drive space is taken up by fonts and font utilities. But fonts for the Macintosh ain’t cheap: a small, 3–member family like Adobe’s Franklin Gothic goes for $99 in MacWarehouse. So when I saw Casady & Greene’s Fluent Laser Fonts package advertised—79 Type 1 PostScript fonts for around a hundred bucks—I thought it had to be an incredible deal. Well…
What I thought Casady & Greene had in mind when they put this package together was an all-in-one package for desktop publishing—a good mix of text, headline, display, script, and novelty faces that would provide the budget-conscious DTPer with a useful and variegated arsenal of type choices. That, unfortunately, is not the case.
First, there are very few choices for body text—none, in fact, that I’d personally be happy with. The only readable serif fonts with usable style variations (bold, italic, condensed, and combinations thereof) are Bodoni and Galileo, and neither is comfortably readable in large chunks of body copy.
Second, out of “79 Typefaces and Styles,” there are so many derivatives and style variations that the whole library really boils down to about 21 or 22 distinct faces.
Third, there is a disproportionate number of script and novelty faces: 7 scripts (11 if you count the 4 Jotts, 15 if you include the 2 Dorovars, Gazelle, and Calligraphy); 3 Western “wood” styles, all obviously derived from the same face; 2 Celtic “hand” faces, Meath and Kells, which are practically indistinguishable from one another; and a few oddities of dubious utility, like Ritz Italic and Gatsby DemiBold Italic(!).
Now, I know that a font library made up of 79 completely different faces, with no style variations, would be pretty useless; but the number of semi-duplications, redundant derivatives, and off-the-deep-end funky faces present in Fluent Laser Fonts makes one wonder about Casady & Greene’s motives, or at the very least their direction. There are some very useful and attractive typefaces here—14 styles of Sans Serif (a Futura-like Grotesk), 8 Bodoni members (I can never get enough Bodonis!), 4 Alexandrias (a Memphis/ Lubalin kinda-lookalike), 8 Micros (a monoline Microgramma or Eurostyle clone), and some nice PostModern display faces in the tall ‘n’ thin mode, Campanile and Giotto.
If you’ve already assembled a good selection of text faces, then the Fluent Laser Fonts set might be a reasonable and inexpensive way to add a number of display faces, but the package doesn’t add up to a well-rounded type library all by itself.
The article above is reprinted from Mac Monitor, the newsletter of The Savannah Macintosh Users Group. It may be reprinted in a single issue of newsletters published by non-profit user groups. Payment shall consist of a single issue of the newsletter in which the article appears, sent to the following address:
